To: Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl, Lynda.Hardman@cwi.nl, Sjoerd.Mullender@cwi.nl, Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl, Maja.Kuzmanovic@cwi.nl, jrvosse@cs.vu.nl, Martin.Prime@cwi.nl cc: Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl Subject: Hypertext 98 and Digital Libraries Trip Report Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 17:25:48 +0200 From: Lloyd Rutledge Hello all, This is a trip report for my journey to Pittsburgh where I attended Hypertext 98 and Digital Libraries 98. For Hypertext 98, I attended the Open Hypermedia Systems Workshop and gave a tutorial. For Digital Libraries 98 I presented a paper and attended the First Summit on International Cooperation in Digital Libraries. Lynda also provided a trip report on the first half of these meetings. HYPERTEXT 98 TUTORIAL I gave a tutorial called "The use of existing public domain standards and tools for adaptive hypermedia". Only three people attended ... perhaps there is an inverse relation between the number of words in a tutorial's title and how many people attend it. There was some good discussion involved and it was the first time I presented much of the material, so I was good to give it a working through. OPEN HYPERMEDIA SYSTEMS WORKSHOP Jacco and I attended this workshop. Doug Engelbart gave the keynote and attended the first day. He discussed his recent efforts with his "Bootstrap Institute" to provide meta-research organizations, such as this workshop. As Lynda wrote, Jacco and I will be involved with XLink. Others in the OHS group, primarily from Southampton, will be involved as well. Steven DeRose will be chairing XLink. He was at Hypertext 98 and we all spoke with him about our and OHS's involvement with XLink. HYPERTEXT 98 I won't try to top Lynda's brilliant synopsis. I ran into a bunch of people who know Maja. This was a particular fun and well managed conference. It was certainly a very "arty" one, with hypertext fiction writers making a very strong presence. DIGITAL LIBRARIES 98 This was a bit of a boring conference, especially coming right after Hypertext, which was such groovy, arty fun. Being very application oriented, it is good to keep contact with them to understand what upcoming needs are ... but it makes for mostly "case study" papers rather than new conceptual research. This is a very SGML-literate crowd, even DSSSL-, and somewhat HyTime-, literate. There was some multimedia (-related) work, but mostly the overlap with what we do is through the hypertext community. Marcel Woring gave a paper. I presented the paper "Practical application of existing hypermedia standards and tools". Made some new contacts. People asked about SMIL and about GRiNS. SMIL is getting a lot of interest. A few others were interested in the Berlage system and how it works. FIRST SUMMIT ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES Rob Akscyn and Ian Witten headed up this last-minute weekend summit. Sixteen of us discussed what should go into a white paper about how international cooperation in digital libraries should be pursued and funded. It was an interested meeting in that it was well organized, well chaired and had some interesting discussions about the politics behind how projects get organized and how they get funded. This white paper may lead to the forming of a group based on the workshop which would rubber stamp approvals on project proposals to various international organizations. Some people from various EU projects were there. We discussed how we could be involved with the next wave of EU CFPs and their consideration process. TRIP HIGHLIGHT Being eagerly offered a piece of birthday cake by Andy Warhol's 8 year old grandniece. Some of us went to the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, where he grew up, for the Friday weekly cocktail hour. Andy Warhol's brother John was there this week holding his 80-somethingth birthday party. A folk-urban artsy garage band was playing "Happy Birthday", and John's granddaughter was all over the place handing out pieces of cake to all comers (though we had to go to the bar for our cocktails). The best part of the museum was the walkable-through white room filled with floating silvery pillows. ****************************************************************************** To: Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl, Sjoerd.Mullender@cwi.nl, Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl, Martin.Prime@cwi.nl, Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl, Jacco van Ossenbruggen , Maja.Kuzmanovic@cwi.nl Subject: Extremely short Hypertext 98 trip report Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 10:18:51 +0200 From: Lynda Hardman I had a great time at Hypertext 98. Lloyd and Jacco had fun too. Lloyd is continuing on at Digital Libraries as I type and Jacco should be enjoying himself on holiday. Our participation in the conference was: Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems - Jacco and Lloyd Having chatted to Jacco and Lloyd it seems that our group can play a role in communicating between the hypertext community and the W3C. Steve DeRose is the W3C chair of the XLink working group and has already chatted to Jacco/Lloyd about participating. Tutorial on public standards and tools.... - Lloyd Attendees were sparse, but keen... Tutorial on SMIL - Lynda I had a "full" tutorial - 9 particpants. Of which 4 or 5 seemed interested and understood what I was talking about. Two seemed to actually be thinking about using it. One asked for the player (he'll mail me) and authoring system. Demo on SMIL/GRiNS - Lloyd, Jacco, Lynda Lots of interest. It didn't help that the list of demos was still at the printers when the demos started. But people came round to see what we were doing. Panel on "Time" - Lynda The best panel of the conference (says she modestly...). (Jacco's opinion was best panel he'd ever been to...) A techie and literati view of time. Maja should have been there. Nitin Sawhney was also on the panel. He's coming to visit on July 10th - and if we can organise it, also give a talk. as well as just being interesting people to talk to.... (A number of people were aware of SMIL already.) There are 3 things I want to follow up after the conference: (1) the OHS/W3C connection. This should involve Lloyd/Jacco going to visit the Southampton mafia in October or so. (2) read up the work I'm interested on in generating presentations in some automatic fashion (including an invite to talk in Manchester) (3) get more into the "literati" side. This has been mostly text based until recently. Nitin gave a paper (demo?) in Hypertext 96, and another creative work called "Califia" was shown. (Mainly text-based with use of images and sound.) What I'd really like to do is have a regular "criticism" hour, where one of us presents a creative work to the rest of us and we can chat about it. (Say once every two weeks.) If we can start this up in August..... ("our 4 main weapons") (4) Keep in touch with Marjorie (creator of Califia) and try to organise a joint techie/literati workshop at Hypertext 99. (Maja - can you make it to Darmstadt?? If we can also get Nitin involved.... ) ("among our weapons") (5) In order to justify travel funding to Darmstadt (in February - groan) we need to write stuff before Oct 1st. Both Lloyd and I have ideas.... Lynda